In this project, I revisited photoshop in order to create a montage of images that communicates a message, opinion, thought, feeling, or narrative. The self-portrait project was my first in depth piece using photoshop. I first asked my friend to use my phone to shoot a picture of me specifically for this project, the photo she took mimiced a photo of me I previously wanted to use for this project but had terrible lighting. I also collected additional objects, photos, or images from the web that I then faded into the photo using a variety of Photoshop tools and techniques.
Per the given objective, my final piece "should look very descriptive and very much explain who you are. You should not try to include pictures of everything you like. Instead, focus on portraying some sort of abstract idea. Think about how everything conveys that idea; everything from pictures to color choices and compositions affects the viewer’s response."
In my first round sketches I focused on the barebones concept I wanted. As opposed to trying to fully flesh out my idea in round one, as I've tended to do in the past.
From the very beginning I knew that I wanted to have something to do with birds, usually this came in the form of adding bird wings onto myself. I loved this idea because wings typically represent freedom. My next idea was for the setting to be in the sky or space because space, to me, represents the unattainable knowlege and vastness of life that I reach for. More ideas I had were editing myself with clipped wings for poetic effect. Myself blindfolded and holding out a heart that would represent how I blindly give love to everything I can. Editing a theatre mask onto myself to represent the characters I play and my love for acting. And one of my final round one ideas was to draw the background and edit myself in to look like I created the world around me.
In my second round of sketches I focused more on the ideas of myself painting the world, sitting on the moon or in clouds, and a few simpler ideas such as having myself face away from the camera and editing myself with wings as they burned. Eventually I chose to work with the idea of myself sitting in the moon and looking out into space.
I started off with the basic idea in the first image, but the listing was odd and I knew id have a hard time fixing it. But the first photo gave me the inspiration I needed to come up with the second photo I took with this project in mind. Originally I was not planning on adding wings but I finished the basic idea in a week and it felt plain. Then I moved on to the idea of adding wings, which lead me to discover that high quality photos of bird wings are much harder to come across than I had thought. Eventually I gave up on that Idea because it really just wasn't working out and moved on to my second option: drawing them. I didn't have an issue with this, I am very practiced in drawing wings so it wasn't an issue. The thing that really tripped me up was the wild contrast between the photos and the art. To my eye it was jarring and I new that I had to add something else. So on one of our last workdays I drew in an alien space ship to familiarize the audience to the cartoony wings and make sure they didn't stand alone. Once I had completed the space ship and shading I had my final product.
